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[BallC420]

My $0.02:

1) I'd love to see more "kingdom-sim" management games come out so I'd instinctively be supportive of such a project.

2) I've never written a game so I can't really comment on your proposed development model. I don't think I've ever heard of a successful game development project that has gone this path before though.

3) I don't think releasing a "DF Clone" is such a good idea. Same genre is fine, even taking "inspiration" from DF is fine, but a straight up clone isn't cool. You mentioned graphics so I'm assuming you just made a bad choice of words and are looking more at "borrowing" some of DF's game mechanics.

4) While there might be /some/ substitute goods effect (i.e. player A would have donated to DF but donated to this clone project instead), I believe that more games in the genre (especially games that are more accessible to a wider audience) are a /good/ thing and should be encouraged. The more games that credit DF for inspiration end up raising the visibility and awareness of what Tarn has built and is continuing to build. The more people know about the genre and DF, the large the potential pool of donors.

5) Folks have been posting about this for a long time: https://www.google.com/search?q=dwarf+fortress+open+source+site:www.bay12forums.com

6) If you really want to use a few dozen man-years of professional development time to just get an open source clone of DF, just have those people do /original/ work (not even necessarily games) and use the money from that to buy it. I'm sure Tarn would consider a serious offer. He's getting like $60k a year in donations so a $1M lump sum would be a good starting point (if he invested it at 6%, he could live off the interest).

[artemonster]

I will try to address most of the questions of the last replies, aside from some insulting and arrogant ones like

So if you could humor me and answer the questions that'd be great.

So:
For this idea I was inspired, mostly, by two things
1. I was lacking some stuff that I wanted badly to see in game (for instance, real trading economics with demand/supply ratings or normal GUI) and was really frustrated that Toady is focusing on completely different stuff.
2. I was seeing how modding community is growing around mostly closed and propriatary codebase (all kinds of different mods that provide advanced mechanics or completely placing you in different (post-apocalypse, hi-tech) universe) and how painfully it is to mod such game.
So the "formula" of success was pretty much "simple":
1. Start off with a very basic engine, that will provide basic rendering capabilities, easy GUI management, entity management and some really core machanics, like world interaction/physics
2. Keep in mind the goal of game content and engine separation, as much as possible, so that everyone, who is capable of writing a mod, can revamp a completely fresh and new alternative to DF-like game, without spawning a slowly dying standalone game.
3. Start to think about a "core game", which will be much like the orginal DF, and will serve for others as an example codebase.

So what happens:
a) if someone is lacking some awesome functionality, or depth of complexity in some aspect of the game - he can start the thread in forum, find interested people, and they can (easily!) add it to the game
b) if someone is interested in a complete revamp (goblin/orc camp), they can do it easily.

How money play along? I've guessed something like a reward system for active commiters can be good (based off donations), and initial funding for engine polishing can also be good (Currently, I have funds to fund a small team of coders for some period of time. Unfortunately, I lack experience to make proper estimates how far we can progress with that).

About whole "stealing the bread from Toady" thing: this is market. And you need to be prepared at some point, that somebody will take YOUR idea and try to outrun you with it. I am not claiming that I am "the man". No. You all were absolutely right, that I lack experience in such stuff. Hell, I am not even a full professional in DF yet But I think, community as a team (opensource) can do better.
Don't want to spawn another holywar here, but think of this idea and DF as of linux and windows.

Thank you for your feedback. I guess that will be all from my side. I should have prepared my topic more carefully and in less aggresive form, so that we could have started normal conversation a bit earlier, without any useless emotions.
Have fun!

[thvaz]

I'll admit that this

I don't know a single coder (and I know many) that would agree with the possibility of DF being cloned in under a year even by a professional team, what to say of a team of volunteers.

You are the dumbest ammoral asshole to ever post here.

Was a bad response due to the end.

It was not gratuitous, although. He was overly agressive towards Toady and the community.

This project will be one more in a graveyard with already some few more developed than yours:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/khazad/
www.goblincamp.com
http://dwarvesh.blogspot.com.br/

[PrimusRibbus]

Greetings OP!

A proposal for an open-source DF comes up every 6 months or so in the forums I visit, so I just wanted to share one of my responses to a similar thread a few years back that outlines some tips for starting an OSS project:

1.) Open Source Software is 90% about marketing: Convincing talented individuals to put uncompensated work into your project is magnitudes harder than making a sale. The #1 killer of open source projects, by a landslide, is leadership that is unable to sell other developers on the project's vision. The guy who critiqued your pitch was spot on.

Being the leader of an Open Source project is tough, and there are plenty of world class developers that don't have the people or business skills to pull it off (there's no shame in that). It's an extremely difficult balancing act between herding all the cats in the direction of the project's vision, but still being able to give up enough control to let talented developers make your project their own passion. Remember, a great developer can fork your project at any time and take your community with you.

2.) Consider not starting from scratch: The joy of open-source is that you can fork something similar, and borrow code and assets from a gigantic amount of projects with compatible licenses. Help me understand why you'd spend tons of time recreating the basic groundwork that other open-source DF-likes have created. Goblin Camp, in particular, seems like a great starting point: It's a very inactive project (so you can leverage the fork to attract restless members of the GC community), the code is clean (at least the last time I looked at the source), and it's already geared towards your stated goal (a pared-down DF-like).

On a side note: Goblin Camp's history also provides some great pointers on the pitfalls of open source development. In particular, it generated a huge amount of press and social media coverage, then squandered it by alienating many talented devs that volunteered to help with the project. There's no point in turning your pet project into a community-driven OSS project if you're not willing to compromise and work with contributors.

I really believe that Goblin Camp would've succeeded if the creator had been more willing to accept criticism, code, and assets. I had A LOT of other frustrations with the creator, but I'm not here to hate. Things got better after the Goons stopped dominating the GC IRC, but it was too little, too late.

3.) Put up or shut up: Most talented developers aren't looking to build your project for you; they either want to create their own project, or contribute to a worthy project. The burden of proof is on you when you say that DF's code isn't that complex; if that's the case, then there's no reason you shouldn't have some sort of tech demo to show.

David White attracted a strong dev team in the early days of Battle for Wesnoth by running under the philosophy that people will only participate in a OSS project if they see strong progress, and realistic ways that they can contribute bite-sized amounts of work. He did every part of the first few releases of BfW himself and it was NOT pretty. It did, however, very quickly attract people who looked at the project and said "Wow, this is promising and the dev is really hitting milestones! I see some places I could contribute."

The most famous example of BfW's early success was the artist fmunoz who saw that the concept was solid, and then decided that he could easily contribute vastly superior sprites to replace White's placeholders. Once the graphics overhaul took place, even more developers came on, and the rest is history.

4.) Create a Roadmap: Figure out what you want to accomplish with your project, then create a mission and milestones.

The reason why your statements about elements of the project being fairly easy were met with derision is because this has been said a million times before. I can't even count how many projects that I've seen pitched by guys with no programming experience who named-dropped engines and stated that it would be a cakewalk.

Create some realistic early milestones and meet them. Without doing that, I have no reason to assume that you aren't another "idea guy" who thinks that Open Source conjures projects out of thin air. If you illustrate in practice that your vision is straight-forward, then it will be much easier to convince people that their contributions actually matter.

Not everything in that response applies to you, of course, but the general gist still stands.

You clearly got off on the wrong foot with the community. My honest advice is to create some small proof-of-concept, then make your case on forums other than Bay12. A fair portion of the community here don't take kindly to DF-likes (even games that are very different and just mention DF as an inspiration get serious flak), and you will still receive ire here no matter what you do. That said, you will not get anywhere by marketing your game as "DF without Toady"; Khazad and Goblin Camp have already proved that that's not a good long-term way to do things.

Best of luck to you!

[Moogie]

About whole "stealing the bread from Toady" thing: this is market. And you need to be prepared at some point, that somebody will take YOUR idea and try to outrun you with it.

You're not talking about an idea, though. You're proposing to hijack the engine and make money off someone else's codebase. If you can't see how you'd get booed off the stage the moment you suggested such a thing, you really need to re-evaluate your decisions in life.

But this feels more and more like a troll with every new post:

Hell, I am not even a full professional in DF yet

What does that even mean??

[Fikes]

Just for reference, I encourage you to go look at "Goblin Camp" http://www.goblincamp.com/

It is an open source semi-clone of DF that a guy started putting together a few years ago. He WAS a talented developer AND had something to show and the project still died.

When you waltz into a group (even an internet group) and you say "Your leader is doing it wrong, we should do it better!" you are going to get people's backs up, especially if you don't have any idea how to actually do it.

[Willfor]

Just for reference, I encourage you to go look at "Goblin Camp" http://www.goblincamp.com/

It is an open source semi-clone of DF that a guy started putting together a few years ago. He WAS a talented developer AND had something to show and the project still died.

When you waltz into a group (even an internet group) and you say "Your leader is doing it wrong, we should do it better!" you are going to get people's backs up, especially if you don't have any idea how to actually do it.

He quotes Goblin Camp in the OP. I'm fairly certain he's aware of it.

[aristabulus]

... Toady is an experienced programmer and it took him 13 years to get this far. One could say "surely it would take 13 people just one year!", but most of these features rely on others to function well, and it's gonna be hard to find 13 dedicated coders.
...

artemonster, I believe he stated it like this for a reason; consider it suggested reading.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Lol, this topic.

[ChairmanPoo]

You have to admit, the feeling of deja vu is kind of pleasant..

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I feel like this topic is some sort of post modern parody-comedy act that we just aren't quite understanding. Not to mention it's in the wrong forum. This belongs in VN.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

The project died before it even began.

/thread